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From: Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Decimals after the point
Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2002 17:35:39 -0800
Organization: AdaWorks Software Engineering
Message-ID: <3DD843EB.54704091@adaworks.com>
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Date: 2002-11-18T01:28:14+00:00
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SteveD wrote:

> "Genevieve B." <geneb@videotron.ca> wrote in message
>
> > I have an idea of putting my float into a string instead and then check
> for
> > the point...and then check for only 2 numbers after it...
> >
> I like your approach:
>   Straightforward.
>   Easy to understand.
>   Easy to verify.
>   Gets the job done.

I am reminded of a project that required reading floating point
numbers from a VAX on an another computer.   The project
involved data from a site that had just lost a contract and
they had to send the data to us.    The sign bit for the VAX
is smack-dab in the middle of the 32 bit word.  Our machine
had the sign bit in the high-order bit.

We first struggled with a alorithm to convert VAX floats to
our machine's floats.   Then we abandoned that.  Instead, we
bought time on a VAX, converted all the VAX float to textual
representation, and then read that into our system.

This can be done so easily with Text_IO.   The amazing thing
is that many Ada programmers still don't know this and I
still see some of them trying to write their own algorithms
to convert floating point values to strings and vice-versa.

Richard Riehle